Posted
by
kdawsonon Wednesday September 13, 2006 @12:15AM
from the any-port-in-a-storm dept.

PreacherTom writes, "We've all connected a myriad of useful things to USB ports: flash drives, printers, webcams. How about a vacuum cleaner? Pair of heated gloves? Anti-cubicle missile system? Joseph Pisani offers a listing of some of the most creative USB-controlled gadgets available, and includes a slide show of the most popular."

My most sincere apologies to Fiftythree.org, but when I read about plugging unconventional things
into the computer, this classic came to mind. Note: the USBKiller is not listed. Scatter a few
of these outside the back door of your local bank.

However, by the same token I'm way more interested in really cheap wireless telemetry a-la zigbee (thermometers, etc) than I am in USB, which was junk to begin with, once it decided to try to play in areas where it really didn't belong.

I agree with parent that anything that just steal USB isn't really a USB device.

However it is worth noting that it is the power that really makes USB different from other interfaces (sure you can steal a few mA from RS232). I quite often use USB to power small electronic circuits (development boards etc) instead of a wallwart or a bench power supply, even if they are using some other connectivity.

I got a USB fan that has a software-controlled speed setting. It's pretty useless outside an air-conditioned room, but it's mostly around for novelty's sake. I hate when people just yank the cord out without right-click removing it from the device list. It leaves the fan in an unstable state and blue screens Windows when I plug it back in.

There are a few interfaces for other OSes too. Someone below mentioned OSX, and there are two that I've seen for linux - I use pymissile [weston.id.au] at the moment (though it needed some fixing to get to work) - being able to control it over the network for teh win!:D

Remember when USB started to go mainstream? After reading for a while about the 'glut' of 'wonderful devices' that would come down on the market and then hearing about USB-powered Tamagotchi (or some such stupidity) I pretty much gave up on the idea... until the laptop light. The USB-powered laptop light. Hell hath no fury compared to my reaching for my wallet to get one of these things at CompUSA the first time I saw them.

If USB gives us nothing more in the way of alternative devices and gadgets, I will consider it a victory anyway =)

In other news, Tesora Gifts of Australia has been puzzled by huge numbers of web hits from Iran and North Korea.
An unidentified NK source remarked that the off the shelf solution was much better than the software responsible for the recent failure of their long range missile test. Homeland Security has dispatched a Special Forces team to seal this obvious breach of export restrictions.

Say goodbye to karma. Oh well.What really friggin annoyed me is that I have a shiny, new cell phone, with a universal plug on the bottom. The charger plugs into that plug, and so does the USB cable. So I can't use the USB interface at the same time as I charge the phone with the AC adapter.

BUT IT WON'T CHARGE THE PHONE WITH A USB CABLE!

What kind of retarded corporate brain damage is that? It would be SO NICE if I could plug my phone into my laptop and charge the phone while I'm plugged in at a starbucks.

Sometimes a half-assed attempt at a good idea is more contemptible than ignoring the idea completely.Let me tell you about such a half-assed attempt. I too have a shiny new phone with a universal plug on the buttom. Both the charger and the USB cable plug into it (as well as other stuff like a headset). The phone determines what kind of device is connected by using an ADC to check the voltage on pin 4 of the connector and changing its behavior accordingly (so this is all in software! !). This behavio

I think you'll find that the phone's main processor is controlling the switched-mode power supply for battery charging. Instead of a comparator, a few resistors and a hefty transistor, they use an ADC and some spare CPU cycles to operate said hefty transistor. The idea is that as soon as there's enough voltage just to power the processor at all, it can deal with the whole business of interrupting and restarting the charging current to the supply capacitor {which is how a conventional SMPS regulates its v

My Motorola phone charges from the usb cable like a dream (I forgot the model number maybe 350 or 385.. its new). Maybe you your usb port are have a cutoff circuit and the Motorola cell phone has a high power rating (which would mean that I am frying my usb port)

I have an LGU8360 which has exactly the same problem - it charges through the same port as the USB data port BUT IT WON'T CHARGE THE PHONE WITH THE USB CABLE! Worst of all is that, when transfering data (it has an incredibly slow data modem, i think it's a 14.4kbps modem) the external screen displays the "connected" image... so if I leave the data to transfer overnight (necessary for anything that is over about 50mb) the external screen drains the power. If it had a seperate data to power port OR it charged

I'm sick of every man and his dog working out that their product can run from 5v dc, and therefore sticking a usb port on it, and saying its now able to connect to your computer!

Imagine if a photocopier did this. Oh no, you can't *print* to it. It just runs off USB power, but because the specification limits a single USB port to 200mA, we have provided a "conveniant" multiheaded usb plug (count them, 4 usb plugs).

No no no no no no

There are some really neat ICs out there that allow you to build a device thats USB controlled, eg the PC can send a signal down the wire (and vice versa) and you can make the device do something. USB pencil sharpers are not a great category for this. USB weather stations are.

Heck, I've always wanted to build a USB *controlled* fan. One that you can change the direction and speed via the USB port.

A really big useful-ness of the USB devices is that you can now replace almost any part of your PC. USB serial, USB parallel, USB sound, USB network. Case-in-point, my network took a power surge via the network/switch. Best I can tell, the server took the main charge, probably though the power supply, and happily diverted it through the ethernet port, which the switch passed on to each device connect. Then end result is the network component on every device on the network is fried. The simple answer, especially for my beauitful geeked-out slimline MythTV box is a USB network. (No room for any more PCI cards)

There are some really neat ICs out there that allow you to build a device thats USB controlled, eg the PC can send a signal down the wire (and vice versa) and you can make the device do something.

Do you have any more information on these ICs? How difficult and expensive is it to build a simple few-channel low-voltage DC DAC/ADC device? Something where I can simply set an output to a desired voltage, and read the voltage into an input channel. I'm not talking waveforms: a response of around 1 Hz would

When you work in the video game industry, you see a lot of weird stuff. At one E3 party, the vice president took off his pants to show off his fishnet stockings while doing a showgirl dance with the PR girls. Weird but he was French anyway.

I wanted to up the ante in a rubber-band-gun arms race in my office, but I couldn't find it available from any online vendors in the U.S. I see ThinkGeek now has a listing for them and they're expected in stock there in October. Anyway, I ended up picking one up on eBay from a guy in Australia for a decent price, about a month and a half ago.

It takes AA batteries to actually power the launcher motors, with a switch on the underside of the base. The part of the missile that locks into the spring mechanism is actually heavier than the the rest of it, so it doesn't always fly nose-first like you'd think. It also doesn't have much in the way of range. If I could find extra missiles for it I'd experiment a bit with weighting the tips to try to address those issues.

I haven't used the included (Windows-only) control app yet, but a guy wrote a control app for it for OS X that's not too bad. You can find it on Versiontracker, I'm too lazy to hunt it down and make a link right now.

The part of the missile that locks into the spring mechanism is actually heavier than the the rest of it, so it doesn't always fly nose-first like you'd think.

We armed our missiles with white-tack warheads (it sticks surprisingly well to foam), and they do fly much better, without a significant loss in range.They do tend to pick up a lot of hairs and muck from this grotty old carpet though.

Of course. The bottle-opener and USB memory are totally separate devices simply attached to each other, without any influence on each other.

Now if there was a bottle opener and USB memory that automatically backs up YOUR physical memory to the drive when the bottle opener is used, allowing to restore it once the effects of the contents of the bottle expire, that would be useful.

Now if there was a bottle opener and USB memory that automatically backs up YOUR physical memory to the drive when the bottle opener is used, allowing to restore it once the effects of the contents of the bottle expire, that would be useful.

That's a brilliant idea - except how would one remember there is a backup to restore to when one needs to restore the memory first to remember there was a backup?;-)

You carry it with yourself at all times, on your keychain for example. And in the morning when you fumble for your memory desperately, you check your pockets and here it is, this little gizmo, with a promising-looking button labelled "restore memory". Zip! and here you are... fumbling for a button labelled "erase memory":)

When you think about it, when you carry a laptop with you all the time, all you're really lugging around is a massive battery with a computer on top of it. Seems to me, that battery could be used to power all the OTHER crap I have to lug around - why carry three power adapters when I really only NEED one?

You can show me all the flashy usb devices that currently exist, but NOTHING is as convenient as one of these [westsidecellular.com].

An USB flash drive with three LEDS (RGB) that are individually controllable by the host computer. Maybe the driver on the host and a dedicated directory on the flash drive with a configuration file. The idea is the flash drive could alert the user to new email, a weather change (like a tiny, old John Hancock building), whatever they wanted.

So, how hard would this be to develope, how much would it add to the price of a flash drive and is it practical? Would it sell?

Last I looked, USB development kits with any chance of helping you succeed right away were about $2000. If you wanted to make a USB device that supplied some simple information, e.g. temperature probe? the light is on --or not--, how would you go about it?

Make a device and supply a command line program to retrieve that simple information. It would seem to be expensive and more than a couple weekends of work.

What does cost a few thousand dollars is joining the USB-IF [usb.org], which is necessary to get a unique vendor ID, which is necessary for drivers to be correctly associated with your device. But you can buy small blocks of product IDs from other peoples' vendor space, if y

Last I looked, USB development kits with any chance of helping you succeed right away were about $2000. If you wanted to make a USB device that supplied some simple information, e.g. temperature probe? the light is on --or not--, how would you go about it?

Go to microchip.com [microchip.com], and search for "PIC18F4550." They'll even give you free samples and code to make it work. You can build the programming cable yourself, or buy one. Google for "PIC programmer."